Cable Traffic: WikiLeaks, Facebook, and You

A dozen years ago, I worked at the Forward, where e-mail correspondence was referred to as “cable traffic.” I always thought the expression was part of the exercise in journalistic nostalgia that was working for the descendant of a Yiddish daily newspaper. When you were told to call someone for comment, the editors said, “Get him on the blower,” and David Remnick’s 1994 article about the Forward was titled “News in a Dying Language.” But like many things about the English Forward and its fedora-wearing founder, Seth Lipsky, it was actually, I have since realized, far ahead of its time.

We are awash in cable traffic this week, thanks (or no thanks) to WikiLeaks, which is dumping a quarter million State Department transmissions on a curious and angry world. These diplomatic messages are still known as cables, even though, as the Guardian explains, our foreign outposts have left behind transoceanic telegraph cables for the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet, which the military uses for command and control. Amy Davidson, Evan Osnos, and other New Yorker colleagues who are much wiser about foreign policy will have more to say about the substance of the cables, but to me they raise questions about technology that affect teen-agers, schoolteachers, and accountants as much as they do for far-flung foreign-service officers.

Part of what comes with the State Department retaining the name “cables” for its now-electronic internal messages is the expectation of secrecy. The various classifications of cables—top secret, secret, noforn, secret/noform, confidential—remind me of the privacy settings for information shared on Facebook. You might let only certain friends see your e-mail address and phone number, but friends of friends can see your status updates, and everyone can see your Wall.

These gradations of secrecy or privacy permit the illusion that you can say something you wouldn’t say to the whole world. And yet, the data is all in Facebook’s servers, and the company has a history of expanding its user base, changing its policies, and revising its defaults, with the collective effect of its users sharing information with more people than they intended or expected to. Revelations about what a Saudi sheikh really thinks about Israel and Iran have broader repercussions than the photos of a bong-wielding Ivy Leaguer with her heart set on a career in banking. Both are open secrets, at least in certain circles, and the betrayal or horror the subjects both feel once their private words and actions spiral out of control are probably quite similar.

At SXSW last year, I heard Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, give a talk about social networks titled “Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity.” She said:

Fundamentally, privacy is about having control over how information flows. It’s about being able to understand the social setting in order to behave appropriately…. When they feel as though control has been taken away from them or when they lack the control they need to do the right thing, they scream privacy foul.

I chose Facebook as an example (and so did Boyd) because of its history of customers screaming privacy foul, but any situation where someone else hosts data that is not supposed to be public, from the credit card you used at T.J. Maxx to your Gmail account to the topless photo you text to a lover. All of these have led to privacy problems (massive thefts; the rollout of Google Buzz; sexting). The media hysteria over sexting, though again with an impact more localized than that of the WikiLeaks cables, has a similar tone to a caller I heard this morning, who said that Julian Assange was guilty of treason, and had this happened during the Second World War, he would have been arrested and shot. This reaction was not on a drive-time shock jock’s show, but on “The Takeaway,” a public-radio collaboration with the New York Times and the BBC. (Which may explain why the caller said Assange maybe shouldn’t be shot.)

The State Department is a social network, and accusing Assange of treason (never mind that he’s not an American citizen) is screaming privacy foul on a national scale. So is the White House’s condemnation of WikiLeaks. At the same time, the Times reports that these very same diplomats have been asked to commit privacy fouls themselves:

One cable asks officers overseas to gather information about “office and organizational titles; names, position titles and other information on business cards; numbers of telephones, cellphones, pagers and faxes,” as well as “internet and intranet ‘handles’, internet e-mail addresses, web site identification-URLs; credit card account numbers; frequent-flier account numbers; work schedules, and other relevant biographical information.”

Whether you buy WikiLeaks’ justification for releasing the cables and whether you accept the arguments by the Times’s Bill Keller and other top editors about why they published and reported on the cables will be popular debates among bloggers and guests on cable TV and talk radio. But it almost doesn’t matter. Today, massive amounts of data can be collected, stored, and mined. We still harbor the illusion that many of our conversations are private or ephemeral, but the company that now owns my very first ISP could have fifteen years of my e-mail on its servers; my instant messages are all logged; my voice-mail messages are now audio files that can be forwarded and archived; my photographs and even my word-processing documents are moving into the cloud. It may be harder today to guarantee that you are having a private conversation than it was in the Soviet Union.

It will be interesting to see (though I expect and maybe even hope most of us will not see) how this and other governments rethink cable traffic and diplomatic conversation in the wake of this latest WikiLeaks data dump. The world is too large and human memory too frail to insist only on face-to-face conversations. The disclaimers corporations append to the end of e-mails and movie studios put on screeners can’t deter everyone. More security around SIPRNet will help, but can’t be perfect. And most diplomats can’t take realpolitik public the way some C.E.O.s let it all hang out. No matter how often the Tom Friedmans tell us what Saudi leaders really think, it’s hard to imagine peace in Saudi Arabia once its diplomats start speaking frankly, publicly, and in Arabic about Israel and Iran.

It took one soldier with the rank of private first class to feed information to WikiLeaks. One day there might be a rogue employee at Google or Facebook or AOL or the company where you work who could make something public that you wish they hadn’t. Ultimately, all these systems come down to trust in other people, corporations, and governments. We know trust will be violated sometimes, but not every Internet user will do as Dan Gillmor, of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, has done, avoiding Gmail and Facebook in favor of “your own home base on the Internet that is controlled by you.” But how many of us can live that way? And I don’t mean knowing enough about technology to be masters of our own data. Life without trust can be unlivable.